In 1988 Akio Morita, founder of Sony, was kicking himself silly. Some may even argue that the man was close to committing suicide. The reason for this sudden urge of depression was because Mr. Morita was forced to face a very harsh reality: his beloved Betamax cassette tape and recorder had just lost a 10-year format war with JVC’s VHS.

Format wars have been around for over a century. The first ever was between Edison’s phonograph and Victor’s gramaphone over dominance of the sound recording industry in 1889. Today we can see a similar war, which has been going on officially for over ten years, against the MP3 and CD. Anyone who has ever invested in an HDDVD player or a Betamax recorder, knows that format wars are nasty, brutal, and for the losing team a huge money pit. Companies can lose millions of dollars in lost revenue when losing in a format war.

In recent years, Toshiba reportedly offered companies 100 million dollars to stay loyal to its HDDVD format, only to lose the format war against Sony’s Blu-Ray. Educated consumers are less likely to pick a side until one format is declared a winner. After all, formats are hardly made victorious because they are better than the competition. Format wars are won through the politics, bribes, government pressure, and other shady business tactics.

In the 1940’s ABC forced the government to make the television standard black and white rather than color because the company had already invested large amounts of money in the black and white format. So if you’ve felt a little down that you never got to see the eye color of Jackie Gleason, you can blame ABC for that.

With all this in mind, one would be smart to just sit back and watch the format war from a distance, and wait patiently for the headline that declares the victor. Still, there are some of us that cannot afford to wait for a victor to be announced.

For an aspiring recording artist for instance, one cannot afford to wait to find out who’s going to win between the MP3 and the CD. Making a name for your self as an artist takes a long time and a lot of effort. Artists must take advantage of all the resources they can afford.

Key word being “afford”. Can the aspriring artist, knowing that their success is not guaranteed, afford to invest his time and money in both MP3s and CDs? In this day and age, is it even necessary for artist to use both formats? A few days ago I put the spotlight on a few unsigned emcees and asked that very same question.

The first thing I wanted to find out was which format was more profitable for the unsigned emcee. This is an important question, because the way in which a signed artist can sell a product cannot be duplicated by the unsigned.

Most unsigned artist don’t have the marketing skills, and if they do have the skill they surely don’t have the money, to pull off a multi-million dollar campaign to convince X amount of people to buy their product. Because of this, unsigned artists have to use grass roots campaigning, and their people skills to connect with potential fans. The best way to do so is the live show. Emcee/neo-soul singer Kalae All Day agreed with this assumption as she pointed out to me that, “[My] CD ( Afromatikneohippierock*Solemuzik) has brought me much more profit because that is something you can sell in person. Right after a show people are more susceptible.” Absolutely. When you are face to face with the potential fan, you become more connected to them than if you were to send them a Facebook blast that has been sent to 1,000 other people with the same message. The performance becomes personal making the relationship between you and the potential fan something real.

I assumed that for every artist this was the case, but when I spoke to Brooklyn emcee Fresh Daily I was proven wrong…sort of. Fresh Daily informed me that his album The Gorgeous Killer had sold more copies digitally than it has in its CD format. Fresh, however is a special case, as his album The Gorgeous Killer was distributed by High Water Music; an independent label founded by DJ Sucio Smash. If Fresh had released the album on his own, as Kalae All Day did with her project, the results may have been the opposite. Furthermore, Fresh Daily’s case belongs to the 12% of album sales that are made digitally out of the 100% of albums sold in the United States. For the most part, albums are sold at record stores, representing 31.1%, and Wal-Mart, 29.7% (in many rural states, Wal-Mart is the go to place for all entertainment goods).

Despite swaying from the norm in terms of album sales, Fresh Daily seemed to be on the same page as the other artist I had interviewed, in that they all agreed that MP3s spread faster than physical copies.

As the Bronx artist YC the Cynic says, “MP3s make today’s emcees relevant. They are about accessibility. How else would someone in Spain get your music?” It seems most unsigned emcees share this opinion, and they need not look further than the success stories of Drake and Pac Div to know that giving away free music online can result in an overwhelmingly large following. What Drake and Pac Div have proven with their free mixtapes is that it isn’t so much about money for an unknown artist, as it is about getting in to someone’s iPod.

MP3 distribution is much cheaper than CD distribution, but it will most likely keep the artist broke. Unsigned artist without a true following and the press to back them up will probably not get paid for a show. Because of this, selling 7 CDs for $10 a pop may make the show worthwhile for the artist. Even if the artist has no following, he or she has still performed and provided a show for the crowd, and therefore should be given some form of compensation. Unfortunately, most booking agents don’t see it this way, so the artist must fend for his or herself. Selling CDs at a show will help keep the artist afloat and help to pay for studio time, album artwork, music videos, business cards, and a slew of other materials every aspiring artist should have at their arsenal. Being able to use the money made from ones art in order to pay for that art should be one of the main goals of the artist. Using the money made from the day job to support one’s art is acceptable, but is also somewhat counter productive. It allows the artist to not focus on finding ways to turn their art in to money, and thus helps keep the artist in a continuous rut.  The artist will find it very hard to sell an MP3 at a show.

As emcee Conscious puts it “how am I going to make money off an MP3 offline? Sell USB drivers or tell everyone to bring their laptops to the shows?”  Even if the artist chooses not to sell their product, and would rather give it away (though this seems foolish when thinking of CDs because CDs cost money to produce) they will still need hardcopies at their shows. Telling someone the name of your site or the download link for your songs after a performance is most likely going through one ear and out the other. You’d be lucky if most of the crowd remembers how to pronounce your name (I’ve had people tell me “Yo Top Money Raz I love your performance…” thanks).

In the end, both formats are very important to the artist. As the industry, and many artists are starting to notice, the CD and MP3 is less of a format war and more so two mediums of the same entity. In other words, the CD and MP3 is more like the movie theater and home video and less like the Betamax and the VHS. In the beginning, many critics believed that the home video would kill the movie theater. Film companies, in fear of becoming obsolete, even went as far as trying to make the VCR illegal.

They were obviously unsuccessful, but found that they too could profit off the VCR, and it ultimately its successor: the DVD player.  Films that don’t make enough money in theaters often make back their budget and find a cult status on home video, in the same way that less commercial artists will gain a cult following and more sales from online distribution.The CD and MP3 will continue to exist because, like the theater, downloading an MP3 cannot duplicate the experience a fan gets from purchasing a CD. “I have to say CD wins this battle,” points out Brooklyn emcee Wordspit (whom was just featured in a national Mcdonald’s commercial), “it’s something about opening the packaging of an album and looking through the booklet that still holds a place in my heart.”

Eric Sosa, an unsigned Queens emcee who has just released a mixtape titled Rhyme & Noodles, shares this sentiment as he points out that “more important to me is owning the hard copy. Especially with an album, cause there’s no replacing the imagery nor the series of events that took place when buying it.” Eric Sosa also wanted to make it clear that owning a CD is more important to him personally, and not necessarily to his career. I would disagree with this, as I feel this assumption fails to realize that the customer is a person just like Eric Sosa, and they too are also fond of the CD experience.